Nobody has ever disputed the beauty of Greek Architecture.
We recognize the justice of a description of the Parthenon as 'le suprême
effort du génie à la poursuite du beau'; but the layman must sometimes ask
himself what does it mean? Where did it come from, where did it go to, why is
it thought so beautiful, how was it that this people relatively insignificant
in power, in territory, and in numbers, was able to attain to this astonishing
supremacy in art? These are questions not easily answered. The evidence is
fragmentary and not always conclusive, the ruins of a few temples and
buildings, a technical treatise by a garrulous third-rate writer in the first
century A. D.,[125] the anecdotes of an indefatigable collector[126] a little
later, the notes of a traveller in the second century,[127] and the materials
collected by the patient research of scholars and archaeologists, pieced
together on more or less ingenious hypotheses. Indeed, a great part of what is
written on Greek Architecture is simply hypothesis. There is not much to go on,
yet Greek Architecture (and by this I mean the architecture of the sixth and
fifth centuries B. C.) remains one of the great outstanding facts in the
history of the Architecture of the Western world, and the Art of the age of
Pericles is the fountain-head to which artists still return.

Where that art sprang from, and how it grew, is largely a
matter of speculation. There have been legends of civilizations wiped out in
tremendous cataclysms that left no trace behind them. Vague suggestions are
made that the cradle of the race was in Asia. All we know for certain is that
the earliest civilizations of which actual historical evidence remains are
those of Chaldea and Egypt, and that the art of these countries reached a high
degree of attainment long before we come upon the earliest traces of art of any
sort in Greece. That both these countries contributed in varying degrees to the
art of Greece is certain, but that is not the whole of the story. As we shall
see, another element comes into play, which made of that art almost a new
creation, differing in outlook and ideal from any art that preceded it, stamped
by the genius of a vigorous northern race with a character all its own. The art
of the East and the art of the West never really fused. There is a difference
in kind between the joyous vitality of pure Greek art, and the gloomy vision of
Asia, with its craving for the vast and terrible, its sombre imagination, its
lack of humanity and indifference to the individual.